Poet, writer, actor, and activist Christopher Logue was born in Portsmouth in southern Hampshire, England. The only child of middle-aged parents, Logue attended St. John's College, Southsea, Prior Park College, and Portsmouth Grammar School. He enlisted in the Black Watch, where he had trouble fitting in, and was posted to Palestine. Logue was court-martialed and imprisoned twice, once for his pacifist views and once for emptily bragging to a friend that he was going to sell army paybooks to the enemy. He spent 16 months in Army prison and, upon his release, struggled to find his footing in London.
In 1951, Logue moved to Paris and found writerly community with the city’s expats and local writers, including Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. He published his first collection, Wand and Quadrant, with the help of friend and collaborator Alexander Trocchi. Logue published prolifically from the early 50s through the 80s, releasing 31 poetry books and pamphlets. He used the pseudonym Count Palmiro Vicarion for bawdy verse and literature, some published through Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, the scandal-provoking house that also released Lolita. Logue also wrote and edited for Trocchi’s magazine, Merlin. He returned to London in 1956 and fell into its burgeoning theatre scene. There, he continued his pacifist efforts, joining the first Aldermaston March against nuclear war, where the international peace symbol debuted. He was jailed for a month in 1961 in conjunction with a Parliament Square protest.
Through an invitation to develop Homer’s Iliad for BBC Radio, Logue came by chance into what would become a lifelong poetic project. Although he knew no Ancient Greek, Logue took inspiration from Ezra Pound, pastiching and reimagining extant translations to create his own distinctive versions. The initial result, Achilles and the River, was broadcast in 1959. Logue refined his cinematic, unmistakably contemporary Iliad translation, known as War Music, in multiple print volumes published through 2005. The final volume, Cold Calls, won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Logue was also honored for his poetry with a Paris Review/Bernard F. O’Connor Award and a CBE.
A wearer of many literary hats, Logue wrote the screenplays for Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage, edited children’s poetry anthologies, and contributed to the satirical magazine Private Eye for over three decades. A poetry performance by Logue of his Pablo Neruda interpretations, Red Bird, was commissioned by the BBC to be set to jazz arrangements. His poem “Be Not Too Hard” was set to music by Donovan and recorded by Joan Baez and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Logue also published an autobiography, Prince Charming, in 2001. He married the journalist and award-winning biographer Rosemary Hill in 1985 and died on December 2nd, 2011.
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More Christopher Logue
Audio/Text: Logue reads an excerpt from All Day Permanent Red at Poetry Archive